(_k_) “He saith, ‘that the ignorance of the true causes and their power, is the reason why we ascribe the effect to liberty; but when we seriously consider the causes of things, we acknowledge a necessity’. No such thing, but just the contrary. The more we consider, and the clearer we understand, the greater is the liberty, and the more the knowledge of our own liberty. The less we consider, and the more incapable that the understanding is, the lesser is the liberty, and the knowledge of it. And where there is no consideration nor use of reason, there is no liberty at all, there is neither moral good nor evil. Some men, by reason that their exterior senses are not totally bound, have a trick to walk in their sleep. Suppose such a one in that case should cast himself down a pair of stairs or from a bridge, and break his neck or drown himself; it were a mad jury that would find this man accessary to his own death. Why? Because it was not freely done, he had not then the use of reason. (_l_) “Lastly, he tells us, that ‘the will doth choose of necessity, as well as the fire burns of necessity’. If he intend no more but this, that election is the proper and natural act of the will as burning is of the fire, or that the elective power is as necessarily in a man as visibility, he speaks truly, but most impertinently; for, the question is not now of the elective power, _in actu primo_, whether it be an essential faculty of the soul, but whether the act of electing this or that particular object, be free and undetermined by any antecedent and extrinsical causes. But if he intend it in this other sense, that as the fire hath no power to suspend its burning, nor to distinguish between those combustible matters which are put unto it, but burns that which is put unto it necessarily, if it be combustible; so the will hath no power to refuse that which it wills, nor to suspend its own appetite: he errs grossly. The will hath power either to will or nill, or to suspend, that is, neither to will nor nill the same object. Yet even the burning of the fire, if it be considered as it is invested with all particular circumstances, is not otherwise so necessary an action as T. H. imagineth. (_m_) Two things are required to make an effect necessary. First, that it be produced by a necessary cause, such as fire is; secondly, that it be necessarily produced. Protagoras, an atheist, began his book thus: ‘Concerning the Gods, I have nothing to say, whether they be or they be not’: for which his book was condemned by the Athenians to be burned. The fire was a necessary agent, but the sentence or the application of the fire to the book was a free act; and therefore the burning of his book was free. Much more the rational will is free, which is both a voluntary agent, and acts voluntarily.